iSuck

So last night I was messing around, moving some files back and forth, and my machine Kernel Panicked. Now, this is a rare occurance. Very rare. So I boot it up again, shrug it off and resume my activities. Then another kernal panic. Then the drive will no longer mount. At this point it’s 3am and I don’t want to mess around with it.

So I wake up today, pull the drive from it’s firewire case, and pop it in the tower. I bust out Disc Warrior and recover the drive, thank the baby jesus. Once everything is happy again, I start playing around with other firewire drives I have trying to replicate the issue. Transfers are painfully slow, but things seem to be okay. I think that maybe my firewire hub is bad. I pull the drive, pop it on the built-in firewire, and start a copy. 10MB/sec pretty steady. Not too bad. Kinda choppy. Hrrm. Let’s pull the hub off there. BAM, 16mb/sec and smooth. So I plug it back in and it drops back down. I start pulling off devices and when I get to my iSight, things hop back to normal.

Apparently, my iSight has gone into pound the firewire bus into submission mode without my consent. So it is now unplugged and will be enduring a replacement. Just to be paranoid, I ran AHT on the machine. Everything seems hunky dorey. Hurray.

I have never seen an iSight do this, and wouldn’t believe it if told about it, but there it is. I suspect the firewire chip in the camera has pooped itself and is throwing fits. I curious to see if this is a problem that others have been having. Maybe I’ll start a class action lawsuit about it. I mean, everyone else is doing it.

Listening to: “The Private Press” by DJ Shadow